We are having a small Thomas The Tank Engine resurgence in our house, and it’s so sweet and adorable. The Captain was really into Thomas when he was three, and we own a lot of Thomas stuff, which we will be keeping forever and ever so my grandchildren can come over and play trains, and man, I cannot overstate enough how much I am looking forward to soft-lit afternoons with cherub-cheeked children, whose diapers I do not have to change, putt-putting around tracks like ye olden days. I’m sure I will be bitterly disappointed by grandchildren who hate trains, or hate me, or live in Africa and thus never visit, but for now, let me have my little dreams.

The Captain still speaks fondly of Thomas, and when I tried to sell his Thomas sheet set a couple of years ago he balked (and frankly, I did too, because MAH BABY). We still get the trains out every Christmas for an old fashioned wooden toy extravaganza around the tree, and the past couple of years the Captain has actually been more into it than ever, now that he’s old enough to manage the design and planning of the track (resulting in some hard feelings from younger sisters who are expected to be the obedient construction crew, but still).

Recently we saw the trailer for Ant-Man and although I am quite skeptical of its quality, we will absolutely be going to see it purely for the teased scene in which miniaturized Ant-Man is battling a miniaturized bad guy along a track with a speeding train, and then it pulls out to reveal that the track is just a Thomas setup with a cheerful Thomas himself chug-chugging down the track. ADORABLE.

(Fast forward to about the 2:15 mark to see Thomas in his glory.)

At Easter I am always looking for little toys to put in their plastic eggs, due to allergies preventing the use of cheap candy (OF COURSE – someday I will write a post about the added costs of having food-allergic children, and I am going to realize I could have been the owner of a couple of Porches and a yacht by now). And when found out that Thomas now comes in little blind packs, with a tiny little plastic engine from the Island of Sodor inside, I was sold.

(Aside: actually, I was more than sold – I immediately wanted to purchase the entire set – because I have serious collector problems, I cannot own PART of a set, and the Captain is exactly the same, which is why we already own every wooden Thomas train and every LEGO set and every Pokemon card in existence, and we probably need a good 12-step program to attend together.)

So I put a couple of little Thomas trains in the eggs, and now we are all loving on Thomas. There’s singing of the theme song (“they’re two, they’re four, they’re six, they’re eight”) all over the house. The Captain’s stuffed monkeys play trains all day while he’s at school, we say. The Thomas sheets are back on the bed. We often ask each other if we can have a “special” today.

It’s sure to be a brief moment but for now, it’s soft-lit days full of a cherub-cheeked boy, calling out “choo choo!” with glee and reveling in the last days of childhood. Him and me both.